Mandatory AI courses

.HEC’s AI mandate risks quality gaps amid faculty, funding shortages

The decision of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) to require a three-credit-hour course on artificial intelligence as part of every undergraduate and postgraduate degree programme appears to be a good-faith effort to get a leg up on preparing the workforce of the future, but the extremely short timeline could lead to serious quality problems. The HEC wants the requirement to be in effect for all students starting their degrees in the fall semester this year, meaning courses would need to be offered as soon as next spring.

While a year may seem like a long time to prepare course material, it is not a long enough time to find qualified faculty. Pakistan's universities are already grappling with a faculty shortage in existing IT disciplines.

AI is a new field where the pool of bona fide experts is quite small internationally, and even smaller locally. Even fewer of these experts will have the aptitude to be good teachers, and fewer still will want to go teach in several smaller universities in less attractive cities and towns. This will create an extreme quality divide, where some students get world-class education from experts, and others have computer science 'generalists' who are going through the motions of teaching a course, effectively wasting their own time and that of students.

The infrastructure gap cannot be ignored either. Many universities — public and private — lack the internet bandwidth and lab facilities required to teach every student an AI course. Mandating a course without investing in hardware and connectivity risks widening the digital divide between elite institutions and the rest. If the HEC wants to make this initiative a success, it must prioritise massive faculty training programmes, curriculum development and infrastructure upgrades.

This is easier said than done, because many public universities may not have the requisite funding, and private universities would also be concerned about the added cost, which could create backlash from students when their tuition and other fees shoot up.